After fifteen years, I understand that people recognize the status and the success of the weaving, but it is more than just the success of the weaving. What is truly important is the knowledge and the integrity of the people from which the weavings come. What I want as a Musqueam woman is to stand equally with the people of Vancouver and the people of the world. I hope that by sharing my ideas about education, people will see the importance of traditional education through our eyes. In order to learn how to weave you have to understand math, you have to understand science, you have to create and play with certain dyes, you have to be a philosopher, you have to understand the intentions of your people - that is education.
To me, education is very complex. It is not about being educated in a system. Education always steps way out of any set boundaries. That's how I feel about learning to weave. It is amazing what I have learned by sitting at the loom. My experiences as a weaver have confirmed what I always believed, that there is a rich tradition of education in my community. It is still relevant today to learn the ways of my ancestors. It is like somebody guides me. I feel that I'm only the hands through which my ancestors work.
I am the mother of three children, Sasheen, Ali and Josh. I have been weaving now for over fourteen years and coming to understand it is an ongoing learning process. I am also one of six sisters, three of whom are weavers. My sister Wendy John started the weaving school in 1983, and my sister Robyn was in the first school. Weaving has become a part of the community again, and it hadn't been for over eighty years.
The thing I remember the most from learning how to weave was watching the women spin their wool. I would watch Barb Cayou, now Barb Marks-McCoy, because she was so gentle at what she was doing. It didn't look complicated, but I knew it was. She made it look so natural that I became interested in spinning. I was mesmerized watching the whole spinning process, just the way she would sit there and hold her wool as she spun. I watched her and realized all of the mechanical things that she had to do to make it all work. Barb made it look really easy. If I was going to be a spinner, that's what I wanted to do. Now, I realize that spinning is one of the most important things, because if you can't spin consistently, it will show up in your design and your entire piece.
Spinning two hundred years ago was even more complicated, because they took dog hair, and mountain goat hair and clay, and they took all kinds of fibres, whatever they had available to them, and they spun it with a spindle whorl.
I used to feel very inadequate in public school. I came into the weaving school knowing that the other women had been weaving for much longer, and I doubted my own abilities. I would always just do the simplest thing. I watched how they worked over the year. I didn't ask them any questions. I would just watch.
When my sister Robyn and I started working together, I would watch her and she would teach me. Sometimes she would get frustrated with me, because I'd have to ask many questions to be sure, but I would get it eventually.
Weaving is really part of a larger whole that can't be extracted. If you extract it you take it out of its context, and you lose some of its power, and its meaning. More and more people are thinking that way. Whether it's art, science, math or geography, people are recognizing that they are all intertwined.
When you really look at a weaver and her/his abilities, you start to see the academic components involved. When we say the academics of art, we are referring to the mathematical and scientific knowledge, the social sciences, and all of the other components that are present in First Nations societies. Too often, society thinks that they brought those disciplines with them from elsewhere. They have always been here. It's only because of historic language barriers and subsequent misunderstandings that as First Nations people, we believe that we aren't worthy, or that our people are somehow less educated. I think we're now moving in another direction and building a better understanding of what all of this means to us, even within our own community here at Musqueam.
Learning to weave is like going to school or university. It's a whole learning experience. With each step you take, you are anxious to move on and discover the next step. Yet, by the time you get to the end result, you realize that all the steps building towards that moment are what's really important. I think that's why I don't get all excited about the weavings that I finish. I've been so involved in it that every step is important, not just the outcome.
I feel that we have come to a place in our community, in our village, where we need to figure out how we can become successful again, based on our own foundation. I know that weaving could be part of our economy, as it was in the days gone by. It wasn't just women doing this beautiful work. The whole community was connected to the work. Weaving was a family project, and the weavings might have been used for a potlatch or ceremony, heightening the success of that family or that community. If you made a hundred weavings and gave them away at your potlatch, you were held in high esteem in your community. You were looked up to. If the weavings were really incredible, then you would be held in even greater esteem.
We hear time and time again that if you don't know who you are, or you don't know where you come from, then you're nobody. You're nobody if you don't have a history, if you can't relate to it, talk about it, or communicate it. So, the weaving is our gift back to us, and to our community. It's amazing to be involved in the time that we are, to be bringing back the values and a sense of success, through our own creative process.
The BC Teacher's Federation commissioned a piece from us. It felt like finally we were in a place where we could feel that we were equals, and we were being treated as equals. The education system in Vancouver is slow to recognize aboriginal or indigenous ways of educating and our systems of knowledge. In my statement, I wrote, "When you look at this piece, I hope you look beyond the beauty and you see the mathematical, scientific, and social aspects of who we are, instead of just looking at it as art. The mathematical components are in there. The scientific components are there. A deep understanding of our natural environment is there, as well as our social histories. We don't always want to be seen in only one place, under the category of art."
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